Dragon-Pilled by Bhutan's Mindfulness City

Stephen Torrence joins Vince Fakhoury Horn to share his experience teaching generative AI in Bhutan and explore the audacious vision behind the Gelephu Mindfulness City — a million-person city being built by Bhutan's King to prove that mindfulness, technology, and economic development can coexist.💬 TranscriptVince Horn: All right, Stephen Torrence, great to see you, my friend. Good to be here chatting with you. Stephen Torrence: Good to see you too, man. Vince Horn: Yeah, yeah. So I understand you’re in Bali right now in Asia. Well, I guess, is Bali considered Asia? Technically it is, isn’t it?Stephen Torrence: I suppose so. Yeah. It’s this little island in the midst of an archipelago of Indonesia, and I consider it to be like a gateway to most of Asia at this point. You know, close to, yeah. Close to many amazing places.Vince Horn: It’s a digital nomad hotspot, I know from recent years, seeing how many folks that I’ve met or that I know who kind of come in and out of Bali.Stephen Torrence: Yeah, and it’s really exploded in that regard in the last like five to ten years. It’s a nice sweet spot between affordable, good weather, and just a lot of interesting people looping through here.I find it to be a nice place to rest my winks on the way to other places.Vince Horn: And you have been flying around a lot. I know. Well, I wanna share a little background and getting to your background, but up until recently, I know you were in Bhutan, and that’s a lot of what I wanted to chat with you today about your experience. Yeah, man, working in the sort of Bhutanese system and with the Bhutanese Dharma folks. But before we do go to Bhutan, I have to go to Asheville, which is where I first met you, in Western North Carolina. I think it was a few years ago. I think it was around that time that you were living with a mutual friend of ours, Daniel Thorson, in this sort of little contemplative startup house.Stephen Torrence: Yeah. I think we called it a Dharma house. We wanted to give the Dharma house a moniker. A Dharma house, yeah. Bring it together like, sure. Beech from Peter Park also. A bunch of us there met at the Monastic Academy, you know, all of us there met at Maple, you know. We’re all ex-monastics, I don’t know, ex-monks or graduates, however you want to put it. “Excons” is probably how ex-monastics would feel about it, probably. That’s hilarious. But we formed really deep bonds there, and we knew at least we could take care of our households, you know, do the dishes without much strife. And it was a wonderful place and great to run into you there.Vince Horn: Yeah. I didn’t even know until that point that you were living there.Stephen Torrence: So.Vince Horn: Right. That was our first chance to meet in person. And I remember you were familiar with Buddhist Geeks, so we had that to kind of connect on, which makes it a lot easier. If you ever want to meet new friends, start a podcast. Then have them listen to all the episodes and sort of prime them for friendships.Stephen Torrence: Get that parasocial friendship going already. Yeah, yeah. They’re gonna see you for the first time and just start unloading all these secrets because they feel like they know you.Vince Horn: But anyway. Yeah, no, it was really nice to meet and connect over dinner. I think that was like the first group dinner I was invited to at the house.Stephen Torrence: I feel yeah, man. Kinda like an honorary founder.Vince Horn: Oh yeah. You were certainly there at the inception of it. And you injected some really good conversation and different realms. I don’t think we could publicly talk about all the things we talked about there.Stephen Torrence: Oh, that’s true. The world’s not quite ready.Vince Horn: Yeah. Just talking about what exactly. All right, Stephen, let’s steer this back toward what is socially acceptable to discuss.Stephen Torrence: No, I mean, it’s good backdrop. It’s a good backdrop though, ‘cause that is how we met and we were geeking out on a lot of really esoteric, nerdy things that first evening.Stephen Torrence: Yeah. And I think it’s just so part and parcel of whatever this network subculture, whatever you want to call it, is that we’re all somehow part of it. It feels like there’s maybe like five thousand of us, you know, globally or something. Like the network is right, pretty dang small. And at one point or another we’ve either lived together or been on each other’s shows or been on a retreat together. Yeah. But on retreat together.Yeah, yeah. I keep finding out many years later that I’ve been in the same sangha as folks that were in the same companies as my friends